Your Party identity crisis

As several Your Party (YP) members have reported, a leaked motion shows that YP have plans to pass a motion which will lead to the expulsion of socialist members. Or it does if it’s real, anyway. We asked YP to confirm at 9:00am on Saturday 11 April, and they still haven’t got back to us.

Among those who have spoken out are CEC members Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi and Zarah Sultana:

Your Party — The dual membership issue

Weekly Worker reported the following on the alleged motion:

The issue of dual membership has proven to be a controversial for YP. This is despite members voting overwhelmingly in favour of it at the conference, as we reported on 30 November:

Following on from the expulsion of some Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) members from Your Party in recent days, the Your Party conference has just confirmed that its members have voted resoundingly in favour of allowing dual membership.

Regardless of the party’s reasons for expelling some SWP voices from the conference, the visible division provided an unnecessary distraction from a conference full of energy and excitement about building a socialist movement rooted in the working class and focused on community organising and engagement. And this was a way for members to show how they felt about it.

Of the full Your Party members who had verified their identities before the vote (under half of the membership of 50,000+), only 42.5% participated. But with an overwhelming majority, it was a clear statement about the need for as much unity as possible on the left. And when former MP Claudia Webbe announced the result, the room was full of applause.

Factionalism

The dual membership issue is a dividing line between Grassroots Left (Zarah Sultana’s faction) and the Many (Jeremy Corbyn’s faction).

Speaking on the divide between the factions in the runup to the February CEC elections, the Canary’s Maddison Wheeldon wrote:

Your Party is currently gearing up for its upcoming Central Executive Committee (CEC) elections on 26 February.

This marks a crucial step in establishing the new political party’s structures. These elections are integral to enabling branches across the country to formally constitute, allowing them to organise effectively and campaign on local and national issues within their communities. However, recent revelations appear to confirm members’ concerns that socialism and genuine democracy are inconvenient obstacles for those who currently hold the reins – and the party’s resources.

Verified evidence seen by the Canary raises serious concerns that Jeremy Corbyn is allowing ally Karie Murphy to exert undue control over internal democratic processes. Far from uniting socialists as promised, these developments appear to confirm long-held fears that grassroots members are being frozen out unless they belong to ‘Jeremy’s team’.

Should YP ban dual membership, it would be a sign that these socialists were right to worry.

In another sign that Wheeldon’s concerns were spot on, YP have failed to run their own candidates in the upcoming local elections. Instead, the party is throwing their weight behind various independents. This has proven controversial, as some of these candidates were quickly shown to have politics which did not align with YP members (and that’s true regardless of which faction said members belonged to).

For more on that, read this:

‘In solidarity’

Wimborne-Idrissi noted that she and eight other CEC members are standing in opposition to the leaked motion. Their message reads in full:

In solidarity with our dual members

Like thousands of members, and as voted on at Your Party conferences in Liverpool and Dundee, we support dual membership and oppose purges of hard-working socialists who have helped build Your Party.

Over the last nine months, these are the people who have worked shoulder-to-shoulder with us to build this party from the ground up. Many of them are playing an important role in fighting elections on 7 May.

While we agreed not to share the proposal ahead of the full report and an open discussion next week, it is only right that we respond to the understandable alarm from members on this.

In building a mass party, we believe our focus should be on growing and uniting our movement — not kicking out hard-working socialists before we’ve even agreed our policies, and while the far-right are on the rise.

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We are working hard on amendments to prevent this concerning paper passing, including asking for exemptions for Scotland as per members’ views.

Solidarity always,
Niall, Mel, Candi, Solma, Sophie, Zarah, Naomi, Grace and Megan

Counterfire

The revolutionary socialist group Counterfire have also spoken out against the leaked motion:

Reject the Your Party witch-hunt of socialists – Counterfire statement

Leaked documents suggest that YP CEC will, this weekend, discuss and (given the inbuilt majority for The Many faction) pass a motion that effectively witch-hunts socialists inside YP and bans far-left parties and networks from membership.
Counterfire condemns, unreservedly, any such witch-hunt.

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Counterfire has thrown itself into building and developing YP. But we cannot, and will not, remain silent whilst socialists are being expelled from the party.

Counterfire is committed to a version of YP that is broad, inclusive, radical and insurgent. A party embedded in our collective movements (in our communities, trade unions and social movements). A space where socialists (from a wide range of backgrounds and networks) can come together to debate and organise to challenge the establishment parties at elections, offer hope in the face of the racist and divisive politics of the far-right, and create organising and mobilising centres for the extra-Parliamentary politics that are central to the socialist movement’s strategic goals of a better world for all.

That vision was there when 800,000 initially signed up, but it has undoubtedly been narrowed by some at the top of YP.

Counterfire will not remain in a party that expels socialists and, if the motion should pass on Sunday, we will immediately leave.

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We call on the YP CEC to reject the motion to expel socialists from YP. If YP has any chance of establishing itself, it must become a home for all socialists on the left of politics in Britain.

Of course, if the motion is passed we will continue to work with YP members, where appropriate, in a range of trade unions and social movements.

Notably, Counterfire was not on the list of banned member groups (i.e. members could always be part of Your Party and Counterfire). Given that, this is a notable act of solidarity on their part.

Your Party — Identity crisis

At the end of the day, if the people around Corbyn wanted to create a Labour 2019 successor party, they should have just done that. Instead, they invited left-wing activists to engage in endless meetings, and then they freaked out when said invitees began steering YP in an increasingly socialist direction — a direction which had ambitions to maximise democracy at every level.

Clearly, the efforts to ban dual membership are an attempt to ‘right the ship’, and to ensure the majority of members are in favour of a top down model of politics. The problem is that Corbyn doesn’t seem to be interested in asserting the control and focus that would be necessary to make that model work, and there’s no obvious successor to him.

In other words, Your Party’s identity crisis seems set to continue even if the Many faction get their own way.

Featured image via the USSR (RIP)